Moving On

9 October 2017

“Fractured” by Lunatic Soul is not an album to be listened to in the evening.

It’s not meant to be savoured with a glass of wine, lights out or eyes closed. When you’re broken, when your world has shattered and fallen apart into pieces, you start to flounce, you start to get het up, uncertain and afraid, your pulse is quicker and your breath shorter. Sometimes you get a break, you calm down for a moment but you never really stop running, you just can’t stop. That pulse, that flouncing, those sharp pieces are everywhere on this album, sometimes their edges are smoothed out with melodies, the piano, the acoustic guitar or symphonic orchestra but what you really feel inside is like that sax solo at the end of “A Thousand Shards of Heaven” or like the driving rhythm in “Moving On”.

It wasn’t meant to be a lyrical journey like “Impressions” or “Walking on a Flashlight Beam”, it wasn’t meant to be a beautiful journey into the underworld from the dark black-and-white diptych. This album has always meant to be a combination of fragments of pure shattered glass with sadness and melancholy. That’s what “Fractured” is like, and that’s the new Lunatic Soul.

Those who like to “zone out” listening to this album might find the new release a little tiring and importunate with its loops, cuts and a lot of rhythm. But the truth is, “Fractured” is closer to rock than to ambient. Closer to day than to night. Because it’s an album we shouldn’t fall asleep to but wake up with wanting to leave all that’s bad behind. To wake up and move on.